Russell Sticklor

Russell Sticklor is a water specialist and journalist covering the intersection of environmental change, demographic change, and human security. He is a Non-Resident Research Fellow with the Stimson Center Environmental Security Program and co-author of “Water and Conflict: A Toolkit for Programming” (U.S. Agency for International Development, 2014).

Contents authored by Russell Sticklor

Many farmers long ago turned to groundwater pumping to cope with water supply shortages. But how much energy do we use to access this water source? The answer has remained something of a mystery — until now.

As our global population concentrates itself in cities, urban areas are becoming increasingly vulnerable from a food security standpoint. Some cities are already sitting on a knife’s edge with regard to food security, with comparatively small stockpiles of locally available food reserves in the event food shipments arriving by road, air, or sea are disrupted unexpectedly.

What if a virtually unlimited energy supply like the sun could be effectively combined with the planet’s seawater supply to help ease global water scarcity issues? In their recently published paper (open access until Sept 2014), Sood and Smakhtin of IWMI assert that using renewable energy to purify seawater could one day revolutionize desalination.

To improve our resiliency to a shifting climate and extend our growing seasons, we must seriously consider not just pumping groundwater to the surface, as we have always done, but also storing today’s surface waters underground to ensure our water security for tomorrow.

Unlike transportation, medicine, and even dam-building — all of which have experienced game-changing technological innovations during the past half century — canal irrigation has remained largely a technologically stagnant sector since the days of the Green Revolution